Members of Pat Schultz’s team stood on the south side of West State Street Wednesday night (March 7) cleaning snow from the base of a wooden pole supporting a power line. Of all the people searching for the St. Patrick’s Day medallion, the quartet was the only group locked in on Pole No. 169.
Later that night, team members CeCe, Luke, Rachel and Pat learned they hit pay dirt to claim the $100 cash prize.
Team Schultz found the medallion inside the pocket of a frozen pair of a cutout section of overall denim jeans buried at the base of Pole No. 169. The team found the section of overalls at the base of the pole. Team leader Pat Schultz tossed it in the family SUV and waited for it to thaw.
Sure enough, later that evening he found the medallion in the pocket.
Two phases in Cluemeister Don Meger’s second clue sent the team counting poles on State Street. The first was in the second clue’s opening paragraph. It was directed at the mathematically inclined. “Hey all you brainiacs, it’s time to do some math. Thirteen times thirteen should send you down the right path.” The second clue directed the team to State Street. A series of state abbreviations in the second clue’s second paragraph read, “It’s ok for me and Al to say hi to Ma and Pa. Oh, I forgot Mo, he’s in the land of la la.”
A reference to an American flag flying nearby – “Hail to our Country, the wockets red glare” -- in the fifth paragraph of the second clue was another sign Team Schultz was near the hidden medallion.
13 Squared
While medallion hunters were using the “thirteen times thirteen” reference to focus their time and energy on sites along Highway 169, Team Schultz tried a different approach.
“I had not heard any other talk about the State (Street) references so I kind of thought we got lucky and got in front of the others,” Schultz said. “There were no footprints or anything, so I thought we were maybe in the lead. Either that or way off.”
As the team checked out State Street, Schultz noticed a pole numbered 185. “We started counting and found 169,” Pat Schultz said.
With no signs of anybody else zeroing-in on State Street, the team returned to Pole No. 169 later that evening and started digging. Snowplows had left the snow 4 feet high and tightly packed along the boulevard. After several minutes of intense digging, the team found the cutout pair of denim overalls. Frozen solid, they couldn’t tell what was in the pocket so Pat brought it home to thaw.
“It was covered by an inch of ice. We couldn’t move it,” he said. “It had obviously been there awhile.”
Later that evening, he discussed his team’s efforts with another medallion hunter, Jeff Miller. Schultz was unaware he had already found the medallion.
But when the cutout section of denim thawed, Team Schultz knew the hunt was over. They had lived up to the billing in the cluemeister’s first hint. The team had found last summer’s Bar-B-Q Days medallion and was within inches of the Harvest Festival Medallion before it was located last fall in Court Square Park.
“The Schultz Family is the standard in this riddle game,” he wrote. “Success is in the genes; it is a burning flame.”
Having found the medallion, Pat Schultz didn’t pass up the opportunity to razz his niece, Lauren Johnson. She had bypassed Team Schultz to work with her cousin, Colin, and their friend Joey Gorman.
“We’ll give Lauren $1 just to make her feel better,” Pat said.
Copyright 2018 Belle Plaine Herald